Navel

DESCRIPTION

Navel is a Mobile-Robots from Navel Robotics. It is built for Companion, Companionship, Guidance. Key figures: 8 kg, released 2023.

Navel is navel robotics' empathetic social robot for elderly care homes, a 72 cm wheeled figure designed to look like an abstracted, comic-like character rather than a technical machine or a realistic human. Round displays behind special lenses form three-dimensional eyes and an expressive mouth, so Navel can make real eye contact and show facial expressions. On-robot computer vision detects and identifies faces and reads emotion, head pose and gaze, while a seven-microphone array localises speakers; dialogue is generated by a large language model such as GPT on GDPR-compliant European servers, and it speaks 74 languages. In care homes Navel addresses residents by name in their native language, remembers earlier conversations, chats about everyday topics, tells jokes and poems, asks estimation questions for cognitive training and responds empathetically, to activate residents, ease loneliness and support dementia care alongside staff. Image data is analysed on the robot and deleted after 100 milliseconds, and conversation data stays on the robot. It is configured through a browser, needs only WLAN and comes as a pre-series care edition or a research edition without the care application but with a Python SDK and the navel control studio. Navel has been used as a pre-series product in German care homes since October 2023.

FEATURES